WHY I CHOSE BEEKEEPING

To put it to you quite bluntly, before I started out with my beekeeping hobby, I was quite bored. I also began to stagnate in my job situation at a critical time in my career. I had been with my company for more than twenty years and had just been handed my third promotion. I could not decide whether I wanted the job in the first place because I was becoming quite passé as well as critical of the processes and procedures that had to be followed. I had no control over this and it would be my job to ensure that the executive’s and its shareholders’ mandates were followed to the letter.

However was I to cope? It felt as though I was in a catch-22 situation. Whether I took the promotion or not, I was still going to be tied down. At my age, there are just too many challenges for me to deal with right now by way of choosing a new career path. Besides, I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do or what I was interested in. The catch-22 situation referred to here also had to do with the money. It is fair to say that while annual increases were less than satisfactory as far as I was concerned, never mind the effort I had been putting into my work over the years, my income grew exponentially the longer I stayed with the company.

And then there is that precious pension that, thankfully, continues to grow as we speak. I’d like to say this just once, well, who knows, I may think of this in a later post on beekeeping and its essentials, I have always agreed with the world’s great entrepreneurs and investors that creative thinking is paramount for growth, whether it be financially or profit driven, or personal or career-oriented. Sad to say this, my company’s executive is still prevaricating somewhere around the dinosaur age. I am slightly optimistic that extinction for these old boys is imminent.

At this stage I am not entirely sure just how soon bees entered the fray after the dinosaur eras ended cataclysmically, but to my mind it must have happened quite soon that the many species of bees entered the earth’s natural ecosystem under the umbrella of your old flora and fauna. Because, after all, bees form such a vital part of the so-called evolutionary and environmental food chains. Without bees about to cross-pollinate trees and plants we might well be doomed. We need these hard-working guys about so that they can survive in order for us to survive.

I became aware of the precarious state of mother earth a few years back. Initially, I was fascinated with the science which in spite of the political denials, turns out to be all true. Global warming and climate change is a harsh reality. Former US Vice President, Al Gore, famously called it an inconvenient truth. He grew up on a farm, by the way, and must have been pretty close to the bees. Although he did acknowledge that back then, many years ago in his case, there was ignorance in abundance where ecologically-sound and organic farming practices were concerned.

My fascination with science drove me further towards the bigger picture which is upon us now. I am only just getting started in my own search for knowledge in regard to saving the environment for both humans and nature. I have become not just awe-inspired but concerned about the weird and wonderful miracles of nature which unfortunately can still be turned on its head by man’s intervention. Invariably, during my discoveries, I found my way to bees. Correlating their industriousness with that of my own corporate career, I couldn’t help noticing the irony in this.

While I’m tempted to rebel and express the creative side of me, not necessarily reinventing the wheel, although it might not be a bad idea at some stage or another, I couldn’t help but be inspired by the manner in which thousands of bees simply follow the rules of nature and get on with the business of producing more honey for their queens and future workers and, more importantly, make important contributions towards sustaining the environment. Whether they do this deliberately or not is beside the point. As I began reading up about bees, I couldn’t help noticing the lessons that could be learned by disillusioned executives such as myself.

There is creativity and inventiveness aplenty amongst the hard-working bees. Proactive behavior is the order of the day and the natural rule of law is not necessarily enforced, but there seems to be an awareness that if any one of these beautiful insects should fall out of rank, their entire empire could collapse. Ethics and responsibility abound in the bee empires left in this burning world. Their worlds lead ours by example.